The Stone and The Sea
by rattlespeare
Summary: A moment of reflection over tea.


**Disclaimer: **Screw you, as if I'd get rich from this shit anyway.

**A.N. : **So, this isn't exactly my first fanfic, but certainly the first I've ever posted. Written in two days and on about 10 cups of Cuba Libre, it's not exactly my best, but it was a fun way to work out some things while I took a break from my original fiction.

Let me know what you think =)

**The Stone and The Sea**

_'He's like the sea'_, Raven thought, her fingers curled around the hot ceramic of her favorite mug.

It was nearing 3 A.M. and the living room was dark; the only light came from the flickering big screen, casting technicolor shadows across the room devoid of sound - the sole other occupant besides Raven having long since muted his show and curled up on the couch for a few moments of turbulant rest. By the time Raven had come in to prepare her usual after-midnight-tea, Beast Boy had already been snoring for well over an hour.

Raven sat by the window, her gaze alternating between the rocky shores of their little island and the changling's sleeping figure. Beast Boy's sleep was a restless one, his face strained and his body fitful, unable to find comfort in his dreams. The empath deliberated on whether she should wake her teammate - if not for his comfort than at least for her own. The young changeling's emotions, already wild during his waking hours, seemed even worse now in the arms of sleep. They rolled off him in waves, a steady push-pull of anger, hate, pain and hope. Honestly, it was giving Raven a slight headache.

She supposed she could have just brewed her tea and taken it back to her room, where she could savor the earthy taste of it in peace. Nothing was stopping her from doing so, really, besides the fact that she ALWAYS drank her tea in the dark tranquility of the living room at night - so different than the usual choas of the day. Raven was, if nothing else, a creature of habit and she'd be _damned_ if she would break that habit just because of Beast Boy. Bad enough that the little green menace had to disrupt her during daylight hours, now he had to go and ruin her night too - and he wasn't even concious!

Raven shook her head, taking another sip from her mug and turning her gaze towards the window.

The moon was a sliver of ivory hung among a curtain of stars, too distant to fathom but just close enough to long for. The sight of it always made Raven meloncholy, though she never knew exactly why, a feeling that was more bitter than sweet, but seemed to settle heavy on her tongue regardless. She took another sip of tea. A particularly strong pulse of Beast Boy's emotions reached her - _regret as black as the ink between the stars, sharper than honed glass, it came with an image: rushing water, a hand held out in supplication _- she looked away from the waning moon, unable to bare her own sadness along with Beast Boy's. The weight of it might have been too much for her and lately her powers seemed to be reigned in with a silk thread rather than a chain. Her eyes fell from the heavens and instead settled on the ocean.

The waters were dark and restless, beating against the stoic rocks with angry white arms. Each wave kicked up a spray of foam and the ocean's arms would reach up to the sky, for a moment, before succumbing to gravity and retreating back to where they came. Raven watched this subtle dance between wave and stone over and over, slowly becoming facinating with it, until she found herself subconciously trying to time her own breaths with the crash of water on the shore. It calmed her greatly, almost like a lucid meditation, and she savored that brief taste of peace along with her tea. She made a note to try meditating outside more often - the sound of the water was like a natural metronome and would no doubt help her in finding her center. With Beast Boy's usual antics, Raven needed all the help she could get.

Speaking of the shapeshifter...

There was a shift in his subconcious emotions - a _pull _where she expected a _push_ - and Raven turned back to look at his snoozing form. Yeah, there'd been a shift alright: it seemed as though the boy's nightmare had finally passed, the expression on his round face smoothing itself out and tenseness of his body finally relaxing into true sleep. The tide of his emotions reflected this. Where before they had been locked in the repeating loop of anger-hate-fear-pain, they had now broadened into the full kaleidescope of all his feelings. Normal REM sleep, un-plagued by the haunting of psychological specters, put everyone closer to their subconcious, where all their emotions originate from - where the "magic" happens, so to speak. Beast Boy's aura now shifted between all of them, contentment rolling into happiness, fear into desperation, sorrow into tenderness - all of this and more- all of them rushing from his form and brushing up against Raven's empathic senses.

_'He really is like the sea.'_ the young half-demon thought again, her eyes half-lidded as she weathered through the perverbial storm of her teammate's aura.

_'Robin's emotions are all controlled; focused and refined down to a point. He's usually got too much self control to let them swamp all over the place. Cyborg doesn't really HAVE emotions, at least not in the typical sense. I suppose it's his robot half that can account for that - the factual, ordered nature of his half-cybernetic brain probably tempers them down to the point where I can barely sense them. If Beast Boy is the sea then Cyborg is like a gentle breeze. Now that's a funny thought. You wouldn't normally associate CYBORG with gentle. Boisterous, perhaps, but definately not subtle.'_

Raven smirked to herself. She could practically hear the "BOO-YAH" echoing in her ears.

_'Starfire...'_ The dark girl considered her alien friend for a moment, _'Starfire is like a sword, or an axe. Her powers are based on her emotions, much like mine - after a fashion. She _needs_ to feel in order for her powers to function. But, much like Robin, her emotions have a certain focus to them - like a carefully honed edge, a tool that has been deliberately sharpened for battle. Even her joy cuts into me like a knife. But that's just it! Her emotions cut, they slice through you - they don't batter at you in endless waves like Beast Boy's do.'_

The empath stood, setting down her now empty mug on the window sill before wandering over towards the greenest of her fellow Titans. Raven stood over him a moment, allowing the television's light to cast her shadow over Beast Boy's sleeping form. During his nightmare the changeling had been curled into himself, giving Raven the impression of a wounded animal. Now he had un-tucked himself, splayed along the cushions and snoring up towards the ceiling with a look of vague contentment. Occasionally, his long elven ears twitched.

_'He's always been like that,_' Raven reflected, ignoring the fact that she was litterally watching the young man sleep. If that wasn't creepy, nothing was. '_Ever since the day we met, I've never seen another person with an aura quite like his. Perhaps it is his link to the animal kingdom that afford him such a..._wild_ fluctuations on his emotions. Or perhaps it is mearly another thing that makes Beast Bo- _Garfield _- Perhaps it's another thing that makes Garfield, Garfield. He's never been one for control, always following whatever inane whim pops into his calcified mind.'_

Raven reached out, scarcly realizing what her hand was doing while she was lost in thought. Her trembling fingers brushed the bangs of his hair, the the distance between their skin measured by mear atoms. The tips of her fingers grazed his forehead just as another wave of his emotions crashed against her - _affection wrapped in a heavy blanket of guilt, a throbbing, keening _need_; a smile, only a smile, the corners of some half-familiar mouth quirked at an angle_ - and she snatched her hand away as though afraid to be scalded by the heat of his thoughts.

Raven let out a breath she hadn't realized she had been holding. Thoughts churned within her psyche, a silent maelstrom of feeling that almost mirrored the sleeping animorph's normal state of mind; that is, before she took another deep breath and focused on the image of a featureless brick wall. Soon her thoughts settled, the well practice dam of her mind allowing her to school her expression to a neutral mask.

"If he is the sea," Raven whispered to herself after a moment, "Then what am I?"

That was obvious.

'_ I am the stone, the rock, the solid monolith that stands in the wake of his tide,' _ her mind whispered, the images of a thousand-thousand hours of annoyance and irritation and...concern and comfort, all caused by the same olive-colored constant, flashing through her mind's eye. '_If he is the sea, then I am the stone on who's back he breaks the surf of his emotional tides on, always stoic, always weathering the storms of him without a blink or flinch - and in return he still comes back with every high or low tide, crashing on the shore with another asinine joke and insepid smile, no matter how many times I break him apart._'

Beast Boy gave a snort, something between a mumble and a snore. Raven walked back over to the window and picks up her mug, making her way towards the kitchen in order to prepare another cup of herbal tea. As with the last one, she opts to use the microwave in order to heat the water, the noise of the kettle no doubt a danger to her friend's now peaceful slumber. She stops the machine just as it's counter reached 'one'.

As she dips the tea leaves into the steaming liquid, Raven wanders back over to her earlier position by the window. The moon had dipped lower on the horizon, a sure sign that dawn was but a few miserable hours away. Raven ignored the celestial satelite, instead turning her gaze once again to the shore far below. The ocean's foaming arms and the dark outcrops of rocks still danced their subtle waltz together.

_And don't the rocks withstand the ocean's tides?_' The empath thought suddenly, cooling the hot liquid with her breath , ' _Don't they stand defiant against the push and pull of the waves? Forever stoic, forever strong?'_

'_Ah,_' whispered some distant part of her mind, _' but you're forgetting about erosion, dear Raven. The sands of the shore did not come to be mearly because some uncaring God wished them to be. Those grains were once all part of some great stone, worn away by time and the ever present carress of the waves._'

Raven did not reply to that distant whisper, content to watch the waters far below the Tower, occasionally glancing at Beast Boy's sleeping form. Already the horizon was beginning to lighten into a shade of bruised purple-pink but the half-demon felt no need to return to her room before the day began. Whatever dregs of sleep that were in her system were pushed away by the tranquility of the silence and the peace of her tea. Besides, Raven had decided on keeping an eye on Beast Boy. Should the nightmares returned, she would be sure to wake him up.


End file.
